Whether or not you're an active disciple of David Allen's popular productivity manifesto, Getting Things Done, you may be aware that GTD has a useful—but complex—processing diagram. If it's too much for your tastes, the UI/NUI/UNI/NUNI system is a simple, easy-to-adopt alternative.

The Web Worker Daily weblog walks us through this classic prioritization method, which originated from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In a nutshell, you assign one of four priorities to every task based on its urgency and importance. Urgent and Important tasks are your highest priorities, naturally, but there's more to it than that:

[P]eople [who] tend to expend most of their energy on the Urgent/Important and Urgent/Not Important tasks, get burned out, and go straight to the NUNIs to relax. Prevailing wisdom says that you shouldn't neglect the NUIs. They're good for your soul.

As the author suggests, non-urgent but important tasks often eventually become urgent and important, so if you're really on top of your to-dos, getting enough done that you're able to tackle some NUIs is a great place to be.

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This system of prioritization is an oldie but a goodie, so if you've been using it yourself (or you're considering using it in the future), share your experience in the comments.